


The Deposition

by Spazzo47



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 09:45:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9485570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spazzo47/pseuds/Spazzo47
Summary: As Rebecca Halliday begins her depositions of each News Night Cast and crew member, she asks them a simple question to evaluate their ability as a witness -- How did you get into journalism.This is for LIlacMermaid's January Fan Fiction Challenge -- Tell me about the journalists!





	

**Neal**

“I was, I was one car away.” Neal didn’t like telling this story and resented Rebecca Halliday for making him tell it. What possible relevance could it have to the case? Was she forcing everyone to relive the most traumatic moments of their lives. Maggie has already told her about Uganda. He assumes Mac and Jim will talk about their time in the Middle East. Charlie has Vietnam. He has the 7/7 bombing. If he went into one car behind the one he chose, he could have been one of the dead.

“Neal, the question is how did you get into journalism?”

Neal swallowed, not wanting to remember. “I was on the train. The bomb went off on the back of the second carriage. I was on the third. Almost asleep. 7 people died that day on the second carriage. I woke up.”

Neal had to close his eyes in a failed attempt to forget the images. The smoke. The screaming. “The train stopped. It was the jolt that woke me up. I thought someone should say something, tell everyone to keep calm. But no one did. There was crying and screaming and just… chaos.” He remembered a little girl. She was across from him. Her dad was there, trying to comfort her, singing. But she kept screaming probably from the chaos around them. There was another person, about Neal’s age who tried to open the door. They tried to dismantle the seats to give them something to break the door open.

The banging. Neal couldn’t get the banging out of his mind for weeks.

“There was all this smoke. If I had more experience, I would have taken out my cell phone camera when I woke up. But I didn’t. I tried to find something to help get the door open. Break a window, anything. We needed to get out. My father was a damn mechanic, I should have been able to find something to break a window.”

One of the men in the car had a briefcase and Neal took it and banged and banged and banged on a window, but it wouldn’t give.

“It’s an interesting story, Neal, but you need to get to the point quicker.” Rebecca wasn't upset, a good lawyer wouldn't be. But she had to coach him, get him to where she needed him to be, get him ready for a jury trial if that's where this ended.

Neal rubbed his face, trying to wash away the memories. “We got out of the train, a guy in an orange vest got us out. I immediately tried calling my parents. There wasn’t a signal inside the train, so I tried again outside of it and I still couldn’t get them. The guy in the orange vest went to the second car and I had my phone out. It was chaos. Some of the people in my car started trying to get people out, others were too upset to get close. I still had my phone out, so I recorded what I saw and just narrated everything I saw. It was instinct.”

“Did you actually bring anyone out?” Rebecca watched his face drain of color. He would make a great witness, he can draw people into his story, a jury would believe anything he said. She took down the note.

“I couldn’t. There were so many people there already, the guy in the orange vest told a few others to go to the next car, there were too many others trying to help in the second car. There was a guy who came up to me, I guess he was watching me record. When I stopped to go to the next car and help there, he told me to keep recording, he’d want to see it when we got out. So I did. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Do you know how many people were saved that day?”

Neal stopped, surprised. “Total, from all the cars?”

“How many did you help get out of cars?”

Neal still didn’t know what she was getting at. “I didn’t help anyone, I just held a camera.”

“If I ask you that in court, you’re going to say that helped get all the people in the cars you went to out.”

Neal sat near tears. “But I didn’t.”

“You reported. You helped to let the world know about the horror of that day. You helped to keep people calm. It wasn’t the actions of a coward. You let them know that what happened mattered and their stories would be told. You were a hero. That’s how I have to paint you when I get you on a stand.” Neal looked confused and near tears. He was proud of the work he did, but he always thought he should have helped them. He should have carried women and children. But he stood there with a phone. “How many cars did you clear?”

“Three. Including the one I was in. There were other men in orange vests helping to clear the others.”

“So you helped three cars of people get free that day. What happened with the video?”

Neal thought back and relaxed a little. “The guy who told me to keep filming walked with me back to King’s Crossing. He said he was a news producer and wanted to take me back to his studio to figure out how to cut it and upload to his station. He thought I was a natural and he gave me job. I worked there for 6 months saving all my money until I could move to New York and stay with my cousin. I applied with ACN and they hired me for their website.”

“And you’ve been loyal to them ever since.” Rebecca looked at the twenty-something. “You don’t have to answer that. We’ll need to work on getting it a little shorter, but that’s exactly what the jury needs to see.”

 

**Don**

“My name is Donald Jefferson Keefer and I’m the Executive Producer of _Right Now with Elliot Hirsch_.”

Rebecca turned from her colleague and said to Don, “You don’t have to talk into the microphone, it has you. What made you go into journalism?”

Don gave her a look like that was the stupidest question he’d ever heard. “My father worked in a TV station his whole adult life. I grew up in a control room.”

“So why not follow in his footsteps and be an engineer?”

“Because they don’t make any money. Next question.”

**Mac**

“I can't think of a time that I didn't want to be a journalist. What instilled in me a love for journalism? I guess it started when I was –“

Rebecca held up a hand to make a stop sign. “Stop! If you’re going to give me a single digit age, I don’t care. Tell me what you love about journalism.” Rebecca turned to one of her colleagues with a note about how to ask this question.

“Can I ask why this is important?”

“If this case doesn’t settle, we’re going to need a jury to like you and show that you know what you’re doing as a journalist.”

“I have been following my father, who was an ambassador my entire life. In high school, I was a reporter for the newspapers –“

“Nope, we don’t care.” Rebecca looked at a disappointed Mac. “I don’t care about your professional experience, I want to know what you love about covering the news. I want your personal story.”

Mac sat back and thought. “My dad used to read the paper every to us every morning and would correct the reporter. One day I asked dad why reporters lie. He said that a lot of times they don’t they just don’t have all the information or they think that some information isn’t important. I told him that when I become a reporter I would make sure I always found out all the information and put it all in.”

Rebecca looked like she liked that answer better. “How old were you?”

“Five or six I think. Ever since then, I always wanted to find out the truth. As time went on it became a calling. To inform the electorate so they can make a good decision about their future.”

Rebecca put up her hand to stop Mac from saying anything else. She knew that given the opportunity Mac would talk for the rest of the night about her philosophy of journalism. For now that was enough.

“That’s good Mac, thank you!”

**Maggie**

“My English teacher, Mr. Baker. He was the newspaper sponsor and he recruited me. I never understood why, but he said he saw something special in my writing. We didn’t have a lot of hard news at our school, but we worked what we had as well as we could. I went to college and majored in journalism and graduated, then came out here."

"Was ACN your first choice?"

"I guess. It was an internship that I was able to secure. One day Will thought I was his assistant, so that became my job. Then Mac promoted me on her first day. She loved that I was loyal."

Rebecca laughed. "That's all it took?"

"She had to think she was going to get fired. I mean. You know about Will and Mac's past, right?"

Rebecca and the panel of lawyers next to her laughed. "Of course we do. I took they’ll kill each other on election night in our pool. Tell me about your teacher."

"Mr. Baker? He was short and bald."

Rebecca looked at her colleagues, who Don started referring to as the Beck-ettes. "Is she making a joke? I'd expect Will to say that, but he'd make it clear it was a joke." The Beck-ettes smiled. "They laugh at my jokes." Maggie wasn’t sure what to say or do, so she sat with her mouth open. "It's okay Maggie, tell me about the biggest news story you did before Mac's inappropriate promotion."

"It wasn't inappropriate. I'm needed here."

"Of course you are dear."

"Bed bugs." Rebecca looked up from her assistant's computer and looked at Maggie wondering what she was talking about. "In college there was a bed bug outbreak at one of the apartments near campus and we narrowed it down to a girlfriend from another college. We decided it wasn't intentional."

Rebecca looked over her glasses. "Was that really a question?"

Maggie tried not to show how intimidated she was. "Yes?"

"Thanks Maggie, that's enough."

 

**Jim**

"After 9/11 my brother joined the army immediately. He didn't have plans for college yet, so he joined up. He didn't come back. I decided I wanted to be a medic in the army, took some classes while finishing high school. I was going to join up and let the GI Bill pay for college. It was the only way I'd be able to go. But I couldn't get through the physical. You have to be able to run a mile in a certain amount of time, and even after training, I couldn't get my legs to do it. I was too late for college that semester, so I found an ad looking for people to help cover the war. It was the next best thing to being in the army I thought." Rebecca looked at Jim who looked stoic, like he had no feelings at all about this part of his story.

"They tested my writing and a few other aptitudes and they liked what they saw. They taught me a few tips about journalistic writing and how to use a camera and shipped me off. I had to file a story every day by 9PM local time. My first partner was a guy named Bernie. He had a ton of experience, made the guys laugh. All of us. All the time. He had me taking some shots of the vast desert, when an IED exploded. He was the only casualty. I dropped the camera and ran with my medic bag. There was nothing I could do. CNN eventually recruited me and they paired me off with Mac. Bernie taught me how to enjoy the news, but Mac taught me how to report it."

"Were you there when she was stabbed?"

"If I'd been any closer I'd have the scar. I bandaged her up. That's all I could do. Helped get her in the Humvee that took her to the hospital, putting pressure on the wound. The doctors said I saved her life."

"You don't sound proud of that."

Jim shrugged his shoulders. "Should I be? I went out there and did what I could, helped who I could. That's all I ever wanted to do. I didn't save them all, just the ones that I could. Mac was one that I could."

"And so she's indebted to you?"

"We were partners. Seeing what we saw, doing what we did. It's a bond that isn't easily broken."

Rebecca sat at the table contemplating, as she did with each person, how to use him or her in making her case. Jim was genuine, in a different than Neal, but too invested in seeing Mac proved innocent.

**Will**

"Well, you know we all make choices. And I was at a crossroad. I could remain a prosecutor, but with a different political party in place, I wasn't likely to move up. I could go into politics, but Republicans don't do well in New York."

"You were a republican?"

"Still am."

Rebecca turned to the man next to her. "Make a note not to ask him that, no jury will ever believe a word he says." Rebecca turned her attention back to Will. "So you could stay a prosecutor or go into politics."

"I was also thinking about going on tour with Leonard Cohen."

"You don't say. A square like you on the road!" She turned back to the person next to her. "Really, eliminate this entire line of questioning, and make a note to coach him on how to talk to a jury. I have a feeling he's forgotten."

"I forgot nothing. I came to ACN first as a legal correspondent. Having a 94% conviction rate got their attention."

"Can you underline the note about him being pompous and arrogant?"

"Ed Marsh did my first interview on air. Showed me the ropes and kind of took me under his wing. He said he had a good feeling about me. We worked on a couple stories together as I rose up the ranks. On 9/11he was stuck in Chicago and Dan Wyatt couldn't cross the bridge, but I was here, so they put me on and then I didn't leave."

"Until you went to CNN."

Will gave her a disbelieving look. "It was a business decision. I thought I was going to get my own show much quicker than I did."

"And you got your show because of McKenzie, right?" Rebecca looked at her row of colleagues. "Her name keeps coming up a lot doesn't it?"

"She's no more to blame than any of us. She was following a story and a former staff member gave her wrong information so she fired him. That's the story you should tell your jury. Straight to the point and easy to understand and prove."

"Oh, touchy, touchy, there Will. I wasn't insinuating anything. Yet." Rebecca took the computer and started typing.

"You know I can read everything you're typing and it's not blatantly obvious that I'm in love with her. She's my partner, that's it. I trust her, I loved her once. And yes, she is a big part of the story of how I anchored my own show. But that story I'm sure is covered somewhere else. Your question was how I became a journalist and the answer is I fell into it."

"And you kept going because of her. I have the statements of your entire staff that said you did the story because you trusted her."

"And Charlie. I trusted her and Charlie. And I had a source that I trusted who told me the same thing."

Rebecca put on her cross-examination face to see how he would hold up against it. She had no question about him as a witness, but she could tell she hit a nerve and wanted to see what he did a little off balance. "And now? Do you trust her now?"

"Of course I do. We were in this together. We always have been. I would trust her instincts over anyone's. I would trust her integrity over anyone's. I would trust her honesty..." Will stopped himself.

"Even after she slept with her ex boyfriend?"

Will gave her a smug smile. "Isn't this the point where you would object to the question?"

"Answer the question, counsellor."

"I trust her implicitly. She has given me no reason not to since she's been back."

**Charlie**

"It's a pretty straightforward story. I joined the military, that's what you did in those days. My job was communications. I made sure my guys knew what was going on and what to expect. I alerted the people above me when something went wrong. When I got back I realized that's what doing the news was and I couldn't imagine doing anything else. So I didn't."


End file.
